Pip: Seeds of Liberty is back, and this week the site is asking the kind of questions that make you want to check your HDMI cables.
Mara: Nick LaDue has been busy — the posts this week cover covert intelligence tradecraft, domestic surveillance and harassment operations, and a surprisingly principled secret society from 1889. Let’s start with the world of clandestine collection.
Covert Intelligence Operations
Pip: These two posts are building out the infrastructure of spy work from the ground up — not the glamorous version, but the unglamorous mechanics of getting information out of hostile territory without leaving a digital fingerprint.
Mara: The Clandestine Collection Service lays out its core logic plainly: “A collection agent obtains the information and places it in a drop location. The agent often sets a signal that a pickup is required. Common signals used in training are moving a plant in a window or putting a chalk mark on something as they pass by it.”
Pip: So the most consequential intelligence in the world travels on chalk marks and houseplants. The upshot is that the entire system is designed to function below the threshold of electronic detection — no signal, no intercept.
Mara: That principle runs through both posts. The CCS prohibits all electronic transmission in some locations because of counter-espionage eavesdropping risks. Cutouts — intermediaries — are given only pickup and drop-off locations, so capture yields nothing useful in terms of intelligence.
Pip: There is something almost elegant about a network that defeats surveillance by refusing to exist electronically. The vulnerability section is equally blunt: everyone has a price, and the CCS trains officers specifically to find it.
Mara: The Special Collection Service covers the cases where even that framework falls short — when data exists only as a physical hard copy, or on an air-gapped machine with no network connection. The SCS goes in person, or alters hardware before it ever reaches the target facility.
Pip: Which is a reminder that the most secure computer in the world is still a physical objects build with circuits and cables someone has access to before it arrived.
Mara: Both games use after-action reports to drive campaign progression — failed missions mean rolling new characters, which keeps the stakes real. That same accountability structure reappears in a much darker context.
Domestic Surveillance And Harassment
Mara: These posts shift from sanctioned intelligence operations to something more troubling — the use of surveillance and harassment techniques against ordinary people, framed partly as game mechanics and partly as documented personal testimony.
Pip: The Directed Energy Weapons post opens the door. DEW describes a decades-long program targeting people governments consider inconvenient — not spies, not criminals, just people with the wrong opinions or the wrong name.
Mara: The post is direct about the mechanism: “The victims are called ‘programs’ because the reason they are being attacked is to try to force by programming the victim to stop doing whatever it is they do or think. If the victim changes how they think they survive.” more or less intact.
Pip: That framing — behavior modification through physical and mental harm, dressed up in bureaucratic language — is the part that lands hardest. The post traces DEW development back to the 1950s, with test subjects drawn from populations deemed expendable.
Mara: Domestic Espionage extends this into street-level operations. It reads as both a game module and a firsthand account — describing how local recruiters, compliant HR managers, and evidence-tampering district attorneys are enlisted to destroy a single target.
Pip: The technique list in that post is where the clinical tone gives way to something rawer: tire punctures, food poisoning, pet killings, stolen objects that somehow find their way back into their home. The specificity is hard to dismiss.
Mara: The post explicitly frames these as “CIA style no touch torture techniques” adopted by non-state groups — compartmentalized, deniable, and designed to leave the target discredited rather than visibly harmed. The operational logic mirrors the intelligence posts, just turned inward.
Pip: Which makes the juxtaposition deliberate. From there, the site takes a sharp turn toward something older and considerably more wholesome.
Hidden Histories And Secret Groups
Pip: The Secret Society of Hobos is exactly what it sounds like, and it is somehow the most formally ethical document in this entire episode.
Mara: Sixty-three transient workers met in 1889 and produced a sixteen-point code. Rule thirteen reads: “Do not allow other hobos to commit any crimes. Expose all crimes particularly those against woman or children to authorities.”
Pip: A secret society with a mandatory whistleblower clause. The 1933 setting — peak Depression, Hoovervilles, riding the rails — gives the TTRPG its stakes, and the hobo sign system gives players an actual communication layer that only Tourist Union members can read with full accuracy. The tourist union is what the club members call their group.
Mara: The post pairs with the Brethren of the Coast, another hidden fraternity built around a code — different era, different membership, same structural instinct: a group that governs itself when no one else will.
Pip: What ties this week together is the question of who gets to operate outside normal rules — and whether the code they follow makes that legitimate.
Mara: The hobos wrote theirs down in 1889. The intelligence services write theirs in after-action reports. Next time, we’ll see what else Seeds of Liberty has been exposing. What thrives in darkness yet withers when exposed to the light of day must not be allowed to continue.
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